The Battle Of Lake Erie

The Battle of Lake Erie

A Collecion of Documents, chiefly by Commodore

PERRY: including the Court-martial

of Commander BARCLAY & the Court

of Enquiry on Captain ELLIOTT:

edited, with Introducion, Annotations,

Bibliography, & Analytical Index, by

CHARLES OSCAR PAULLIN

With portraits, facsimiles, and map

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

1 COMMODORE OLIVER HAZARD PERRY TO MAJOR-GENERAL WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, SEPTEMBER 10, 1813

2 COMMODORE OLIVER HAZARD PERRY TO SECRETARY OF THE NAVY WILLIAM JONES, SEPTEMBER 10, 1813

3 LIEUTENANT GEORGE INGLIS TO COMMANDER ROBERT HERIOT BARCLAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1813

4 EXTRACT FROM THE DIARY OF DR. USHER PARSONS, SEPTEMBER 10, 1813

5 COMMODORE OLIVER HAZARD PERRY TO MAJOR-GENERAL WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, SEPTEMBER 11, 1813

6 COMMANDER ROBERT HERIOT BARCLAY TO COMMODORE SIR JAMES YEO, SEPTEMBER 12, 1813

7 COMMODORE OLIVER HAZARD PERRY TO SECRETARY OF THE NAVY WILLIAM JONES, SEPTEMBER 13, 1813

8 COMMODORE OLIVER HAZARD PERRY TO SECRETARY OF THE NAVY WILLIAM JONES, SEPTEMBER 13, 1813

9 COMMODORE OLIVER HAZARD PERRY TO MAJOR-GENERAL WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, SEPTEMBER 15, 1813

10 COMMODORE OLIVER HAZARD PERRY TO SECRETARY OF THE NAVY WILLIAM JONES, SEPTEMBER 17, 1813

11 COMMODORE OLIVER HAZARD PERRY TO SECRETARY OF THE NAVY WILLIAM JONES, SEPTEMBER 18, 1813

12 COMMODORE OLIVER HAZARD PERRY TO SECRETARY OF THE NAVY WILLIAM JONES, SEPTEMBER 20, 1813

13 SECRETARY OF THE NAVY WILLIAM JONES TO COMMODORE OLIVER HAZARD PERRY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1813

14 SECRETARY OF THE NAVY WILLIAM JONES TO COMMODORE OLIVER HAZARD PERRY, SEPTEMBER 22, 1813

15 DR. USHER PARSONS TO WILLIAM PARSONS, SEPTEMBER 22, 1813

16 SECRETARY OF THE NAVY WILLIAM JONES TO COMMODORE OLIVER HAZARD PERRY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1813

17 COMMODORE OLIVER HAZARD PERRY TO SECRETARY OF THE NAVY WILLIAM JONES, OCTOBER 16, 1813

18 COURT-MARTIAL OF COMMANDER ROBERT HERIOT BARCLAY, SEPTEMBER, 1814

19 COURT OF ENQUIRY ON CAPTAIN JESSE D. ELLIOTT, APRIL, 1815

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE

ANALYTICAL INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAP OF THE BATTLE OF LAKE ERIE

REDUCED FACSIMILE OF A DISPATCH OF COMMODORE PERRY TO SECRETARY JONES, SEPTEMBER 10, 1813

From the original manuscript in the United States Navy Department Archives, Washington, D.C.

PORTRAIT OF MAJOR-GENERAL WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, 1815

From the Portfolio (Philadelphia, 1815), third series, vol. v, 305

REDUCED FACSIMILE OF THE LETTER OF COMMODORE OLIVER HAZARD PERRY TO SECRETARY OF THE NAVY JONES

From the original manuscript in the United States Navy Department Archives, Washington, D.C.

GLORIOUS NEWS

Facsimile of a broadside announcing the victory. From the original in the collection of the New York Historical Society

PORTRAIT OF COMMANDER ROBERT HERIOT BARCLAY R.N., ABOUT 1820

From a photograph in the Library of the United States Navy Department, Washington, D.C. The original painting is in the possession of Mrs. Theodore C. Barclay, Edinburgh

PREFACE

PREFACE

The documents selected for publication in this volume are chiefly of an official character, and are those of greatest interest and probative value. There are other documents, to be sure, which the future historian of the battle will wish to read, such as the affidavits of Perry’s officers and Perry’s charges against Captain Elliott, but these are unofficial and are biased. Moreover, to have included them would have swelled the book beyond its prescribed limits. About one half of the documents here presented have not been previously published, and many of those that have been published are now issued in a more complete and precise form.

The editor wishes to thank the officials of the United States Navy Department and the Library of Congress in Washington and of the Public Record Office in London for the facilities afforded him in collecting materials for this volume. He is under special obligations to Mr. Charles West Stewart, superintendent of the Library and Naval War Records Office, to Captain Richard Thomas Mulligan, U.S.N., assistant to the Bureau of Navigation, and to Mr. Goodloe Earle Yancey, chief clerk of that bureau; all of the United States Navy Department, Washington, D.C.

CHARLES OSCAR PAULLIN

Washington, D.C., March 25, 1918

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

The primary theater of war in our second conflict with Great Britain, 1812-1815, was the St. Lawrence water-system and the adjacent territory on each side of it. One of the two secondary theaters of war was the maritime frontier and Atlantic seaboard, stretching from Maine to Louisiana (with the exception of Florida); and the other, the deep sea, including the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. The Battle of Lake Erie was fought in the western part of the primary theater of war, on September 10, 1813, midway in time between the commencement of the conflict in June, 1812, and its close in February, 1815.

This battle was the turning point of the war in the west. Previous to it, the American offensive campaign in that quarter had been uniformly unsuccessful. In the summer of 1812, General Isaac Hull, who had advanced into Canada and had besieged Malden, abandoned the siege, retreated to Detroit, and there surrendered that post and his army to the British. About the same time Fort Michilimackinac, near the junction of Lake Huron with Lake Michigan, fell into the hands of the enemy; and Fort Dearborn, on the present site of Chicago, was abandoned. The American military boundary in the Northwest was pushed southward to the line of the Wabash and Maumee Rivers. Lake Erie was held by the enemy by reason of his naval superiority on that water.

Having obtained possession of a considerable part of the American Northwest, the British carried the war south and southwest of Lake Erie. In September, 1812, they sent an expedition against Fort Wayne, Indiana. In May, 1813, they besieged Fort Meigs on the Maumee River, and in August they attacked Fort Stephenson on the Sandusky River. Each of these movements failed.

Early in 1813, with a view to recovering the ground lost in the previous year, General William Henry Harrison, who had succeeded Hull as commander of the American army in the west, assumed the offensive. In January a division of his army reached the Raisin River in southern Michigan, and was there defeated and captured by the British. Harrison was compelled to abandon his plan of advancing into the enemy’s territory by land, and to apply himself to the defense of his military frontier on the Maumee and Sandusky Rivers. Having successfully defended Forts Meigs and Stephenson, he made preparations to advance into Canada by way of Lake Erie. In the summer of 1813, he collected an army along the line of the Sandusky River and established his headquarters at Senecatown or Fort Seneca, ten miles up the Sandusky from Fort Stephenson, which was situated about ten miles from the mouth of the river at Sandusky Bay. Some forty miles across the lake, on the Canada side of the Detroit River, near its mouth, was Amherstburg, where the British had a naval depot, and Fort Malden, which was occupied by British troops. These were Harrison’s objectives. His passage across the lake, however, was blocked by the British fleet, which was in possession of that water. The outcome of his second plan for offensive operations for 1813 depended upon a trial at arms between the British and American naval forces on the lake. By August his preparations were nearing completion, and he anxiously awaited the coming of the American squadron, with whose commander he had been in correspondence for several months.

When the war began, the Americans had no naval force on Lake Erie. As the enemy soon assembled a small fleet there, he held undisputed sway over that great natural highway which formed a most important part of his line of communication between Lower and Upper Canada, and along which he transported troops and military supplies. On his possession of Lake Erie depended his ability to hold Upper Canada (west of the Niagara River), Michigan, and the Northwest. Early in the war the Americans had recognized the need of a naval force on Lake Erie, and on September 7, 1812, Commodore Isaac Chauncey, the commander-in-chief of the naval forces on the lakes, with headquarters at Sacketts Harbor, New York, sent Master-commandant Jesse Duncan Elliott to Buffalo to select a site for building vessels. Here in the fall of that year a small fleet was assembled. On February 17 of the following year, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry,¹ who had been stationed at Newport, Rhode Island, in command of a flotilla, was assigned to the command of the fleet intended for service on Lake Erie. On March 27, he arrived at Erie, Pennsylvania, not far from the eastern end of the lake, where he found under construction the two sister-ships Lawrence and Niagara. They were brig-rigged, and of four hundred eighty tons burden. In June he removed to Erie the five vessels that had been collected at Buffalo. To these he added three other small craft, making a fleet of ten vessels, all but one of which participated in the battle of September 10. Small as these vessels were, it was necessary to remove the guns from the larger ones before they would pass over Erie Bar, which lay outside Erie Harbor. The existence of this bar made it possible for the British fleet, which was blockading Erie, to pen up Perry’s forces and render them useless. Fortunately, at an opportune moment, the British commander relaxed the blockade, and Perry was able to reach the open lake. At nine o’clock in the evening of August 4, the day on which he succeeded in this undertaking, Perry wrote to the secretary of the navy, dating his letter from his flag-ship, Lawrence, at anchor outside of Erie Bar:

I have great pleasure in informing you that I have succeeded after almost incredible labour and fatigue to the men, in getting all the vessels I have been able to man over the bar, viz. Lawrence, Niagara, Caledonia, Ariel, Scorpion, Somers, Tigress, and Porcupine, They areneither well officered or manned, but as the exigency of Genrl. Harrison and the whole of the Western Country is such, I have determined to proceed on service. My government, should I be unsuccessful!,